SWAMMERDAM 191 



There is, as we now know, one occasion in the life of 

 the queen when she flies abroad unaccompanied by 

 workers, but this was unknown to Swammerdam and all 

 other naturalists until the time of the elder Huber. In 

 this emergency Swammerdam might have profitably 

 recollected the maxim which he quotes from Bacon, that 

 it is not our business to devise, or to think out, but to 

 discover the method of Nature. He betook himself to 

 thinking out, and the result was his theory of an aura 

 seminalis. Drones shut up in a box or bottle give out 

 a strong odour ; during the summer months a hive con- 

 tains thousands of drones ; if the queen is not fertilised 

 like other female insects, was it not possible that she 

 might be fertilised by the effluvium of the drones? 

 This supposition, at least in the seventeenth century, 

 when seeds were thought by some to be fertilised by an 

 effluvium from flowers, and when strange fables as to 

 the generation of saints were not yet wholly discredited, 

 had sufficient plausibility to justify further examination. 

 An experiment was hit upon by Swammerdam, the very 

 experiment by which long afterwards Huber demolished 

 Swammerdam's theory, viz. that of exposing a virgin 

 queen to the emanations of drones enclosed in a per- 

 forated box. It impairs Swammerdam's character as a 

 scientific man that he never tried his own experiment ; 

 he ought either to have thoroughly tested his theory, or 

 to have withheld it. He speculates also upon the possi- 

 bility that the eggs of bees, like those of many fishes, 

 may be fertilised after laying, but here again he had no 

 facts to go upon, nor did he try to procure any. 



Swammerdam's description of the comb is tolerably 

 full, but too familiar for repetition. He notices the 

 remarkable constancy in size of the cells, and tells us 

 that some Frenchman had proposed to make them the 



